Doing Good: Rotary International

Paul Percy Harris and His Good Idea

On February 23, 1905, four men gathered at an office in downtown Chicago for the first meeting of what was to become Rotary International.

The meeting was called by Paul Percy Harris. Born in Wisconsin in 1868, he later moved to his grandparents’ home in Vermont when hard times befell his family. He attended the University of Vermont for a short time, but was expelled “due to an incident involving a secret society” in 1886. He then moved on to the presumably more secret-society-friendly Princeton University in 1887. 

Harris departed from Princeton upon his grandfather’s death in 1888, settling in Des Moines, Iowa, where he apprenticed at a law firm and then attended Iowa University. After graduating with a law degree in 1891, he moved frequently and held a number of jobs—as a journalist, fruit picker, actor and cowboy—before landing in Chicago in 1896, where he became a practicing attorney.

His story is of interest because when Paul Percy Harris called that meeting of the first Rotary Club in 1905, he lit a spark that exploded into an international network, which today includes more than 36,000 clubs with 1.4 million members, and holds consultative status at the United Nations.

The First Service Club

As noted in a previous article, “The Changing Nature of Doing Good, a multitude of service clubs started in the United States and spread rapidly in the early part of the twentieth century. Rotary was the first, and has grown to have one of the largest active memberships.

Rotary was established explicitly as a non-political and non-religious organization, initially for business people from diverse backgrounds to meet and trade ideas and form lasting friendships. The first four members chose the word “Rotary” to illustrate their plan to rotate meetings amongst member businesses, but with rapid growth the notion was abandoned in favor of meeting in a regular location. 

This friendship club officially became the first American service club in 1907, when it undertook a project to construct public toilets in Chicago. The organization’s focus on humanitarian service is best exemplified by its two official mottos: “Service Above Self”, and “One Profits Most Who Serves Best”. 

Following the formation of the first club, Harris hit the road with his good idea and Rotary soon expanded with clubs in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland and Seattle. By 1910, 16 clubs met for a convention and voted to unify as the National Association of Rotary Clubs.

Clubs rapidly expanded outside the United States, with a Rotary club established in Canada in 1910, Dublin and London in 1912,  Cuba in 1916, the Philippines in 1919, India in 1920 and so on. In 1922, the club was officially renamed Rotary International.

Conflict With The Church, Communists and Fascists

The rapid international growth of this secular organization caught the attention of the Catholic Church. In 1925, an article in the influential French magazine Le Croix accused the Rotary of being an American-Anglo Freemason organization trying to get its hooks into Europe. A book published in1929 by a Jesuit in Spain claimed that Rotary had more than a whiff of Freemasonry about it.

Needless to say, perhaps, this made it hard to expand into Catholic countries, which Rotary was actively attempting at the time in South America. The organization’s response was to recruit James R, Roth, devout Catholic, member of the Knights of Columbus, fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, and charter member of the Rotary club of Lima, as emissary in the region to assuage the fears of the devout.

And though the Church’s view of Rotary mellowed with time, as recently as 1951 the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office forbade priests to attend Rotary meetings or become members, and admonished the laity to stay vigilant against any secret society shenanigans if they joined.

Authoritarian governments in Europe also reviled Rotary. Countries under the sway of communist and fascist dictatorships banned local Rotary clubs, being deeply suspicious of an international network of do-gooders operating in their jurisdictions.

With the fall of fascism, clubs again spread in formerly occupied Europe, and with the fall of the Soviet Union, in eastern Europe and in Russia, with the Moscow club opening in 1990.

A History of Good Deeds

Their fascinating history aside, Rotary does much good in the world.

Honoring their roots in advocating for the first “comfort stations” in Chicago back in 1907, they are participants and supporters of the UN’s World Toilet Day, celebrated every year in November.

The club’s list of heroic accomplishments is almost unmatched, even among more famously philanthropic enterprises. 

In 1979, Rotary partnered with the Philippine government in a program to deliver and administer the oral polio vaccine to the six million children of the country. With the success of the project, the eradication of polio became a focus of the organization, which launched the global PolioPlus initiative in 1985. By 2016, members had contributed $900 million toward the effort, and today over 2.5 billion children have received the oral vaccine.

Other areas of interest to Rotary are promoting peace, fighting disease, providing clean water, supporting education, saving mothers and children, growing local economies, protecting the environment and responding to disasters. 

A myriad of programs are undertaken at the local, regional and international levels by the clubs working alone or together. In addition to supporting student exchange programs, scholarships, youth leadership programs and peace fellowships abroad for professionals, members also work on small projects in their communities to make them better. Things like planting trees in Elk Grove and Los Gatos, or improving parks in Capitola, Aromas, Morgan Hill  and San Juan Bautista, 

Breaking Bread, Then Mending the World

Though over 100 years old with clubs dotting the globe and generating millions of dollars a year for grants and scholarships and vaccination drives and exchange programs and a seat at the UN for goodness sakes, Rotary remains true to its roots as a social gathering. 

Weekly meetings start with a shared meal among friends, before taking up business.

Learn More: Rotary International